As Vanessa Carlton wrote songs for her new album, she'd often look past her piano at a painting made by her maternal grandfather.

"It was right in my eye-line view as I sat at the piano," says Carlton, who'll release her fifth album, Liberman, Oct. 23 on Dine Alone Records. "The colors are bright fuchsias and ocean blues." Eventually, Carlton decided to give her album her grandfather's original surname, because the painting looked the way she felt her record sounded — "kind of a psychedelic palette, but it was a very classical painting of these three nudes. It was actually the same woman, his muse."